Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, by Charles Bernheimer

Charles Bernheimer defined decadence as a "stimulant that bends suggestion out of form, deforming conventional conceptual molds." during this posthumously released paintings, Bernheimer succeeds in creating a serious thought out of this perennially stylish, hardly understood term.

Decadent Subjects is a coherent and relocating photo of fin de siècle decadence. Mature, ironic, iconoclastic, and considerate, this amazing number of essays exhibits the contradictions of the phenomenon, that's either a and a mind set. In trying to exhibit why humans have did not provide a passable account of the time period decadence, Bernheimer argues that we frequently mistakenly take decadence to symbolize anything concrete, that we see as a few type of agent. His salutary reaction is to come back to these authors and artists whose paintings constitutes the topos of decadence, rereading key past due nineteenth-century authors equivalent to Nietzsche, Zola, Hardy, Wilde, Moreau, and Freud to rediscover the very dynamics of the decadent. via cautious research of the literature, artwork, and song of the fin de siècle together with a riveting dialogue of the numerous faces of Salome, Bernheimer leaves us with a desirable and multidimensional examine decadence, all of the extra very important as we emerge from our personal fin de siècle.

Review
Effortlessly integrating his outstanding archival examine, Bernheimer offers readers the experience of being in a collegial seminar with him.(Choice 2003)

Charlie had many pals, admirers and highbrow interlocutors within the box, and the booklet will locate an immense position with them, either as a homage to his reminiscence, and as a testimonial to the type of literary-historical-psychoanalytical scholarship he represented in literary studies.(Emily S. Apter, collage of California l. a. 2005)

An first-class ebook by way of a widely known authority within the parts of eu literature, tradition, and psychoanalysis.(Christopher S. Nassaar Pre-Raphaelite Studies)

From the Publisher
"Charlie had many pals, admirers and highbrow interlocutors within the box, and the publication will locate a tremendous position with them, either as a homage to his reminiscence, and as a testimonial to the type of literary-historical-psychoanalytical scholarship he represented in literary studies."
~ Emily S. Apter, collage of California Los Angeles

Charles Bernheimer used to be a fashionable student within the parts of ecu literature, tradition, and psychoanalysis. He taught Romance languages and comparative literature on the collage of Pennsylvania and authored and edited a number of books, together with Comparative Literature within the Age of Multiculturalism, a part of Johns Hopkins' Parallax sequence.

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Extra resources for Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

Sample text

The notion of an organic whole, in terms of which Nietzsche considers the majority of mankind to be pathological, serves the same function structurally as the notion of becoming, which the majority of mankind is too weak to aﬃrm. Wholeness (health) is to fragmentation (decadence) as becoming (health) is to morality (decadence). The logical contradiction in this parallel is evident, but Nietzsche is not perturbed by it. Most important to him, it seems, is that decadence remain as the critical term of condemnation in those structures of paired oppositions that are crucial to his thought—despite his distaste for their metaphysical artiﬁce.

The relative ignorance in which the regent is kept concerning individual activities and even disturbances within the communality is among the conditions under which rule can be exercised. In short, we also gain a valuation of not-knowing, of seeing things on a broad scale, of simpliﬁcation and falsiﬁcation, of perspectivity. The most important thing, however, is: that we understand that the ruler and his subjects are of the same kind, all feeling, willing, thinking—and that, wherever we see or divine movements in a body, we learn to conclude that there is a subjective, invisible life appertaining to it.

Although the numbering suggests a logical sequence, the logic of the continuity is often diﬃcult to discover. The sections are usually made up of paragraphs, but sometimes only of brief epigrams or poems. Sections are collected into larger units, labeled “parts” or “essays,” and the last book, Nietzsche contra Wagner, is composed entirely of selections from his previous writings. Ecce Homo contains chapters whose titles are those of Nietzsche’s previously published books, of which he gives critiques here.